TSA Returns Woman’s Lost Luggage… After 17 Years!
Mary Minor Davis December 23, 2014
After nearly 20 years, a lost bag has found its way back to its rightful owner, courtesy of the TSA.
You could call it a Christmas Miracle.
Maria Dellos, an artist and teacher in Arizona, told FlyerTalk that she was teaching an art class last Thursday when she got a call from the Tucson office of the TSA saying that they had her bag.
Maria Dellos couldn’t recall that she was missing any luggage. She had reported lost luggage back in August to both United and US Airways — who had handled her bags during a very difficult 14-hour return trip from Elmira, N.Y. — but she said she and her family got those bags back after three days.
Dellos couldn’t describe the suitcase TSA claimed to have with her name and an old address in it. When she heard what was inside, though, she remembered reporting a bag lost nearly 20 years ago on a trip home from Las Vegas. Apparently, that same bad had shown up on the doorstep of the Tucson TSA and the agency was trying to get it back to its rightful owner.
“I’m perplexed more and more with this story,” Dellos told FlyerTalk. For one thing, when she lost the bag 17 years ago, there was no such thing as the TSA. So how did they end up with it?
“When the woman called me, she said it had just been sitting there,” Dellos noted. “It had an old name and address for me, but thankfully the phone number was the same. [The TSA] seem to get a lot of the blame for what goes wrong in airports, but in this case they did something right.”
[Photo: KVOA]
The title is misleading. It suffests that TSA kept the bag and then returned it 17 years later. There was no TSA 17 years back, and hence it most probably was held by someone who decided to drop it off in the TSA office. While I have my complaints with TSA like everyone else, I think they are trying to do a good job in most cases and hence we need to acknowledge that they went out of the way to find the owner of bad they had no responsbility for.